While 87% of small businesses have a website (Forrester), many of these
businesses are being let down by inadequate tools. In response, online
software startup BigTurns has a platform, a web-based
application that completely replaces traditional web hosting with a
fresh, business- oriented approach. BigTurns is the world’s first
web hosting platform that automatically tracks and profiles visitors on
your website, creating a complete picture of customer behavior. This
empowers business owners to know their customers more intimately, make
better business decisions and ultimately improve profits.

Shopping online can be a great experience. You don’t have to leave the comfort of your home and you can quickly compare and read about all the competing products in order to pick the best one for you. But it can also be a little frustrating if the process isn’t designed correctly.

Looking around for that checkout link, having to fill out registration forms and then being told the product is out of stock isn’t going to make your day. Spend a little bit of time fine tuning your checkout process and polishing off the user experience and you’ll be rewarded with happier customers and more sales. Here are 12 useful tips to help you do just that.

Choosing the right software for your website is critical

Last year over 10 million US small businesses were prioritizing their
online business(Forrester), yet managing it is still a nightmare of
confusion and complexity. It’s that nightmare that BigTurns puts to rest with it's "Sales and marketing software for websites", a web-based
application that makes setting up online easy with all the tools that
business owners need to succeed. In contrast to existing solutions, BigTurns completely replaces traditional web hosting with a
business-oriented approach that puts the spotlight on understanding
your customers and getting better results – while saving time and
money.

Marketing Trends and Specialized Systems Slow Business Down

Building an online business is hard work for small business owners.
Modern trends in marketing toward blogging and email marketing simply
highlight that business owners need more than a plain website. Web
analytics, online shopping and lead management are also high on the
list of priorities, but vendor selection is daunting and their approach
specialized. “In many cases, business owners are working with a fistful
of disconnected systems to manage their online business. That means
they need to waste time importing and exporting data to keep the
systems in sync,” BigTurns' Operations Manager Aidan Leonard says.

BigTurns - A One Stop Solution

BigTurns takes an integrated approach to online businesses with a
results focused attitude. By incorporating website management, lead
management, email marketing, online shopping, blogs, and business
analytics, BigTurns is a one stop solution. Most importantly, BigTurns offers a customer centric vision of your website, with
every feature integrated into a central customer database. This means
businesses can automatically build customer profiles and track behavior
across their online business, to make better decisions and improve
profits.

Less Time, Less Money, Better Results

The
result is that businesses are saving time and money while achieving
more online. “We’ve got customers telling us that using BigTurns is
saving them a day of work a week,” Leonard says. And while being able to
access so many vital features of your business from a central console
is a huge benefit for business owners, there’s a significant cost
benefit too, according to Aidan. “You could spend 5 times as much for
a solution comparable to BigTurns – and it would need to be custom
built by programmers. Our customers are spending less money, and
getting more.”

BigTurns runs inside any web browser with no downloads required,
and no time consuming setup. The software will be offered on an
affordable subscription basis comparable to current web hosting costs.
Currently in private beta, you can request an invitation to use
BigTurns for 30 days by going to www.BigTurns.com

BigTurns creates software to empower small business owners to take
their business online with less fuss and better results.

If you’d like more information on BigTurns, a live
product demo or an interview with Charles Brodeur, please contact us here: http://www.bigturns.com/ecommerce/vancouverCanada/contactUs

Research Sources

Data Source: Forrester
report: “Making Sense Of Hosted Commerce Platforms” – 44% of small
businesses (roughly 24 million small businesses are operating in the
USA) listed internet or ecommerce initiatives as a priority or critical
priority.

The year 2010 should be used to optimize your existing eCommerce
Platform.
Many Online Shops I see out there have enormous potentials for
improvement. Some of them can't be implemented easily, e.g. Clean URLs
(URLs which just reveal their resource, but not their technology) - here
you are often limited by the technology and platform you use. However,
there are many things you can do in the field of technical Search Engine
Optimization (SEO). For this purpose one option would be to create a
whole new template to get started. You can overhaul the GUI (graphical
user interface) and optimize the template for all the search engines
like Google and Yahoo. What needs to be done for this can be listed
quickly:Read More

Ever wonder if the basics from grade school would come in handy in
your business life?

Getting your website ranked best in internet
search results uses all of that knowledge. Search engine results are
based on those science, math and English courses. Internet technology
is the science that allows "spiders" to comb the "web" for data
applicable to a search inquiry. Search engines have unique
mathematical algorithms that formulate your website's relevance to
that inquiry. Finally, your English lesson is where writing the copy
on your website can help tie all of that together for best results. In
the following, you will get valuable tips on creating titles,
copywriting advice, using graphics, and keywords to better place your
website in search rankings.

This is the first Post for The eCommerce Blog from Sales and Marketing Automation.

Our mission with this blog is to promote eCommerce Best Practices to Small business owners. We will be including topics that relate to building eCommerce Sites, marketing eCommerce Sites and managing eCommerce Sites.

We are not sure where this journey will take us but the general direction we are going to set out on is to expose the tricks that make successful sites sell.

I will be the main contributor to the blog postings, and all of our contributors will some how be related to BigTurns Business Systems, an eCommerce Consulting Company with an eCommerce Platform for sale and a team of eCommerce Consultants.